Blinding Light
by kenansense
Summary: Heredity and environment, not innate evil, shape one's behaviors. Tom Riddle wasn't born evil, but one moment of his life may be more to blame than any other...ONESHOT


**Blinding Light**

**A/N 1: No, Tom Riddle is not in love with Anakin Skywalker.**

**A/N 2: I don't know if Anastasiya's name is proper construction for a Russian name, so if it's not, please let me know.**

_There needs to be a light_, Tom Riddle thought.

He was sitting in the Slytherin common room, waiting for his girlfriend Anastasiya to finish preparing for dinner. While he was waiting (annoyed as usual; do girls _really_ have to take hours preparing for every small thing?), the thoughts, as they had many times before, had come upon him.

Tom had always been intelligent. Ever since his entry into the wizarding world, he had always been one step ahead of all other students; one step ahead, as it was, of some of the professors. Albus Dumbledore, his Transfiguration professor, was the only one who even came close to penetrating the thoughts that whirled around in Tom's substantial brain.

_There needs to be a light, a blinding light. One that would come down from the skies and strike at all those liars and fakes, all the thieves and murderers, all those that became what I was so close to becoming. There needs to be a light that reveals everything about each person in the world, good and bad, and that light should pass judgment on them all._

At fifteen, Tom had had all too much experience with those who seem to be one thing and then are another. Hypocrites. His father, his mother, his grandparents, almost every student in Slyltherin House, those who teased him at the orphanage after pretending to be his friends...Tom imagined them being pierced by a white light, forced to account for their sins. Tom Riddle had never been a very religious boy, but he found himself thinking back to Sunday school at the orphanage. The students were taught that good was rewarded and that evil was punished, but not until after one died. For Tom, waiting until death seemed like an eternity, much too long a time for him to continue to suffer at the hands of those that pretended to be good.

His thoughts turned back to the good. He and his girlfriend, Anastasiya Kirilenka, had been dating for five months now, five months that had been better than any other time in his life. Anastasiya, instead of criticizing his strange thoughts and feelings like the only others who knew about them, his parents, did, tried her best to help Tom. Anastasiya was a Muggle-born, and for this reason was able to guess that Tom had depression. At least, it _sounded_ right, for Tom had long, long periods of time where he felt like doing nothing but lazing away the days in his four-poster, occasionally cutting himself just to feel _something_, anything. Ani was about as smart as Tom was—the first time in Tom's life where he could discuss things and not feel like he was confusing the person he was talking to.

And instead of condemning him for his thoughts of revenge on Muggle-borns, Ani debated with him. "You cannot punish an entire race for the actions of a few," she was fond of saying, and Tom found himself believing her. She was beautiful, so good, so...everything about her was amazing. There was no other way to describe it, and Tom often found himself trying to put down his feelings for Ani into words, but he wasn't able to succeed.

Ani had by far become the catalyst in Tom's life. He had been so suppressed in childhood, so detested in adolescence, that he had never had the time or ability to develop any feelings other than hatred, self-preservation, and anger. Ani had changed all that. She had taught him love, love unlike anything Tom had even come close to feeling before. She and Tom had made love, too—not for the same reasons that all the other boys did it, but for the simple reason that they were in love with each other and wanted to show it. That single act seemed to revitalize Tom's very soul, erasing some of the damage his Dark Arts research and hatred towards Muggles had done and replacing it with love, the greatest panacea, the cure for all that ails.

Tom glanced at the clock. It was almost six-thirty. In half an hour evening classes would begin. Where the hell was Ani? She had always had a habit, an annoying one at that, of taking, at minimum, half an hour to prepare for things like dinner and common room parties, things that Tom would usually not give the slightest thought to. But she _was_ beautiful every time, he had to give her that. Sometimes it made him wonder why she bothered being with _him_, who was not particularly handsome, but every time he voiced this concern Ani laughed and said, "You think you aren't handsome? Stop being an idiot," until Tom had to laugh sheepishly and forget his concerns as Ani pulled him in for a kiss.

"Ani?" called Tom in the general direction of the stairs to the girls' dormitories. Salazar Slytherin, unlike Godric Gryffindor, had no chivalrous ideas polluting his brain, so Tom could have easily walked into the girls' dormitories. However, this would most likely earn him an angry outburst from his girlfriend, so he had to resort to calling her in this fashion.

There was a pause of about five seconds, following by Anastasiya's hurried voice. "Tom, give me some _time!_ I'll be up in a second!"

What _was_ she doing down there? What had taken her so long to answer? Tom's paranoid, intelligent brain immediately found the worst possible answer—she was French kissing some other guy down there. However, his heart overrode this suggestion, telling him that Ani was not likely in the slightest to cheat on him; if she didn't want to be with him anymore, she would tell him. Wouldn't she?

"We're going to be late!" Tom shouted, before returning to his seat. Any more nagging from him would be constituted as harassment; he would just have to deal with it.

Tom sat down with a sigh and stayed that way for all of two minutes, after which he stood up again, massaging his temples. His treacherous brain continued sending images of Ani removing the clothing of a Gryffindor seventh year, something that, although Tom was making significant progress controlling his anger, still made his blood boil. For some reason today the feeling was stronger than ever, so that with every second that passed it seemed to double in intensity, overcoming Tom's mind until the only thing he could think of was the continuously broadcast pornographic image of Ani sharing her love (as she had for Tom, and Tom only) with someone else.

Any other night Tom would have let it go. Any other night he would have sat down, chiding himself for being so immature. But earlier that day he had seen Ani laughing and talking to an older boy, and although Ani had become angry and he was forced to drop the subject, the fear had stayed with him. Irrational as it may be, Tom was going to check his instinct out, whether Ani liked it or not.

Although he had used them less and less as the year had progressed, Tom knew many Dark spells that, while they would not land the user in Azkaban, all texts known to contain them were immediately confiscated by the Ministry. One of these was a spell that the Ministry found very effective against the Germans (World War II was still raging at the time), a spell that allowed its user to listen in on conversations happening great distances away. Tom did not know the physics of the spell—he assumed that the sound was amplified somehow and then projected into the caster's ear, and he suspected that resonance was involved—but he knew that it would be ideal for this situation.

Stopping once to consider whether he was doing the right thing—his gut cried out at him to cast the spell—Tom raised his wand and whispered, "_Acousticus Amplificus!"_, pointing it in the direction of the girls' dormitories.

At first there was silence, and Tom began to mentally berate himself and prepare to cancel the spell. However, one sound registered an instant later, and it was that sound that doomed the world.

"Mmm...mmm...we really should go, Jacob. Tom will get suspicious."

Tom hadn't even processed this statement yet before another registered, the husky voice of a male—

"That idiot hasn't caught me yet, and I have the Cloak."

"Don't call him an idiot! He's kind and sensitive—"

"This again? He's obviously not _sensitive_ enough, or else you wouldn't be here with me right now..."

Tom felt his heart break in two. Feeling as though he was moving in a dream, he approached the girls' dormitories, all qualms about entering now settled. As he opened the door, he saw Anastasiya in the process of flinging the covers over her naked body and a boy's shoulder disappearing under an Invisibility Cloak.

He said nothing. He just looked Anastasiya in the eyes, his cold eyes piercing hers to the core. She looked away, and she knew he knew.

Suddenly Tom tackled the figure under the Cloak. The Invisibility Cloak ripped away, revealing a naked boy that Tom realized as the older boy that Ani had been talking to earlier that day.

"What the hell did you do?" shouted Tom. "What did you do to my girlfriend?"

"I didn't do anything to her, mate," said the boy derisively. "She did most of the work herself..."

Tom's fist was to his face before he could say another word. The boy rose to his feet, spitting out blood, and silently exited the room. Tom made no move to follow; he didn't feel like doing anything but curling up and dying.

"This isn't really—Tom—you know I love you!" said Anastasiya.

"_Silencio_," said Tom quietly, not even pointing his wand at her. His former girlfriend was silenced, her desperate words causing her to look like a fish gasping for air.

Gasping for air. Dying. Tom wanted to die.

No. He wanted to _conquer_ death. Death was nothing…

Tom swept his way out of the room silently, his chest aching, although the boy had thrown no blows.

That night, Tom began again his investigations into the Dark Arts.

There needed to be a light. A light to purge the world of Muggles and Muggle-borns, those who caused the persecution of wizards throughout history. Those who didn't understand him and so marked him with a stigma from the beginning of his life.

Tom closed his eyes, tears flowing unbidden out of them. The full moon had risen above the lake, the lake where he and Ani used to take walks in the moonlight, kissing and giggling, telling each other over and over that they loved each other, that they would never leave each other…

Tom opened his eyes. A feeling was coursing through his body, the feeling that had been suppressed since the beginning of his relationship with Ani and was now returning, returning despite all of Tom's attempts to keep it back—

Tom didn't want to keep it back.

There needed to be a light.

Tom would be that light.


End file.
